Hosting WordPress on Cloud with Cloudways

WordPress is gaining a lot of fame in the world of Content Management Systems (CMS). More than 27% of the web is currently based on WordPress. It doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger or an agency running an online store, WordPress is the best and easy solution.

Creating a website on WordPress is one thing, but retaining it in the long run by making it profitable is another. So, what helps you to achieve this and doesn’t put your data at security risk?

The answer is simple, a reliable hosting platform. It ensures that your website will not suffer any downtime, give an ultimate performance and is secure. You must have heard about Shared, Dedicated and VPS hosting. However, the word Cloud Hosting is maybe new for you. That’s because it has emerged rapidly in recent times giving ultimate performance, security and 99.99% uptime.

There are quite a many cloud hosting providers available across the Internet. One such managed cloud hosting provider is Cloudways. It is one of the fastest growing hosting trends within the online industry. Today, we are going to learn what Cloudways is and how you can launch your very own WordPress on it in just a few clicks.

What is Cloudways?

Cloudways is one of the Managed Cloud Hosting platforms specialized in WordPress Hosting. You can say, it is a bridge between You and different Cloud providers. It takes care of all your server-side headaches, allowing you to completely focus on your business rather than hiring a high-paid sysadmin to manage a server.

We will not get into the depth of Cloudways as we will leave that up to you. Although, we have covered basic features of Cloudways later in the blog; however, you can explore the rest during your free time. Let’s cut to the chase by installing WordPress on it.

Install WordPress on Cloudways

Installing WordPress on Cloudways is only a matter of few clicks. All you need to do is select your application (WordPress), choose your Cloud provider (AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean, Vultr, KYUP), set necessary attributes (bandwidth, server size, etc.) and click launch. There, you are all done!

After creating an account and verifying your email address. Log in to your account and click on the Launch button. It will take you to the Servers tab.

A new window will pop up from where you can choose your desired application and create a server. Select WordPress from the first drop-down.

P.S: If you plan to launch an eCommerce store, choose WordPress with WooCommerce from the dropdown, as it is purely optimized for an online store. Same goes for WordPress Multisite.

Some of the text boxes labelled above are as follows:

Name Your App: The unique name of your WordPress installation. It will ease your query of identifying the application if you have launched many.

Name Your Server: You can name your server too, just to identify a specific server among others.

Select Your Project: The Project option is like a folder where you can put projects/applications with similar features in a single place. By default, it is set to the default project.

Moving down the launch sequence, the next step is to Create a Server. Choose your desired cloud infrastructure from a number of available options. For now, I will select DigitalOcean. It provides a 14-days free trial while others offer 3-days trial sessions.

After selecting the cloud provider, choose the RAM in Server Size tab. For a live site, we suggest you have at least 1GB RAM server. Then, the final step is to choose your Server Location from a list of available options globally. It is always recommended to choose a location that is nearest to your targeted audience. Finally, hit the Launch Server button at bottom right. And you are done with creating a server and launching a WordPress site on Cloudways.

Access WordPress Website

Once the server is launched, navigate to the Applications tab at the top left corner of your screen. There, you can easily find your WordPress application.

You can always add more applications on the same server by clicking on the Add Application button. For now, select the installed WordPress application to know what’s in it.

With the launch of the server, your WordPress website will automatically be ready. Doesn’t that sound great? No extra hassles.

To access your recently launched WordPress application Click on URL under Admin Panel label. You will be directed to a WordPress admin login screen which will appear in a new tab. Use default Username and Password listed above to access the admin dashboard.

As you can see there is a WordPress cache plugin called as Breeze installed on your website. This cache plugin was developed by Cloudways to further boost the performance of WordPress-based websites.

That’s all there is to launching WordPress from Cloudways. Now, you can play with your WordPress application. If you want to know more about Cloudways, then read on!

Let’s understand a bit about the backend of Cloudways.

There are two important sections at Cloudways

Application Management

Server Management

Explore Application Management – Cloudways

The Application Tab allows you to manage your WordPress application with ease. You might get confused what other labels refers to, so let me help you understand it a bit better.

Access Detail: Access Detail allows you to have the default WordPress website URL and admin area access. Beside Access Details, you can find MySQL database credentials.

Domain Management: It allows you to take your website live. You can point your domain from here.

Application Settings: It allows you to change general application settings such as Varnish, PHP-FPM, Folder name, etc.

Application Add-Ons: All application related add-ons can be enabled, configured and disabled from here.

Migrator Tools: You can migrate your WordPress site from other hosting to Cloudways.

CloudwaysCDN: It is an optional service, which you can avail on $1/25GB/month per application.

Explore Server Management – Cloudways

Hope, you have understood the application management tab. Now, let’s see what you can do with your server. Navigate to Servers tab from the top left screen. You can find all created servers listed here.

You can launch as many servers as you want by clicking on the Add Server button. For now, access the server that we have launched recently.

Once again, there are a number of options available to handle your server. Let’s explore them one by one.

Master Credentials: Here you will have FTP credentials to access files of any application within this server.

Monitoring: You can monitor server usage from here.

Manager Services: Cloudways bundles with lots of server-side features like Apache, PHP-FPM, Nginx, Varnish, etc. You can control them all from here.

WordPress Performance on Cloudways

You can get an exceptionally fast performance for your WordPress application at Cloudways. As we have talked a lot about it, let’s have a practical experience by analyzing WordPress installation and performance at Cloudways with Pingdom. Here are the results.

We kept the following configurations:

WordPress 4.7.1

PHP 7

MySQL 5.6

HTTP/2

Let's Encrypt

Server: New York

Tested from New York

Varnish & W3TC Enabled

The results look great! Faster than 99% of tested websites! Now that’s an excellent speed. However, if you want to get more speed, you can add a CDN too!

Cloudways Features:

Besides advanced caching technologies, Cloudways is packed with a lot of features for server and application both. What makes Cloudways standalone in the market is what it offers. It comes with

Cloudways Infrastructure Providers

To provide maximum uptime, security and performance Cloudways is partnered with one of the top Cloud Infrastructure providers in the world. Some of the reliable names on the market are DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and Kyup (Container based cloud provider). You can now deploy your applications on any one of these infrastructures with just a handful number of clicks.

Cloudways Pricing

As far as the pricing is concerned, only a few cloud hosting provider offers a Pay-As-You-Go pricing system, and Cloudways is one of them.

It means that you are only accountable to pay for what you have consumed. Assuming that you have recently launched a server on the 20th of a month, you will only be charged for ten days and not the entire month instead. Sounds good? Because it is 🙂 Oh and btw you only have to pay for your server, regardless the number of applications you have installed on it!

Final Words about Hosting on Cloudways

Doesn’t it sound easy to host WordPress on different cloud providers at Cloudways rather than hosting it directly? If you are a non-techie that don’t know sys-admin stuff, you might have to hire a big-budget professional just to manage your server. Don’t worry! We got it all covered at Cloudways. A highly dedicated team is already there to help you out. So make a step ahead and experience the power of cloud hosting.

Best WordPress Deal

Free Domain Name

Best SEO Tool

Top WordPress Developers

WPism (WordPress-ism) is a blog on everything WordPress covering tutorials, tips, themes, plugins, hosting, help on WordPress topics and more. Our main focus is helping marketers using WordPress for content marketing, SEO, and Social Media. Learn more about WPism .

Disclosure: Like several websites on the internet, some of our posts might include affiliate links. You can support our hard work by using those links to make any purchases. We earn tiny commission at no additional cost to you. Read our full FTC disclosure .

Check Your Website SEO

WPism is the best source for all things WordPress. Our mission is to empower bloggers and publishers.